The neon sign for The Rusty Gear flickered, casting a rhythmic, sickly pink glow over Elias’s grease-stained workbench. It was 3:00 AM, the dead space of a Tuesday, and Elias was living his own version of a hard day’s night.

"Just one more bypass," he muttered, his fingers shaking as he hovered a soldering iron over the delicate motherboard.

One wrong move and the whole thing would fry. He closed his eyes for a second, the opening chord of that old Beatles track—the one his grandfather used to play on a real, wooden record player—ringing in his ears. That sharp, clanging G7sus4 that signaled the start of a marathon.